Seville

SEVILLE

In golden hues, and byzantine blue, vidriado tiles
greet the lost and weary traveller in Seville.
Sunlight momentarily emolliates the new year’s winter

in a halo of light behind the orange trees.

In Tiempos pasados the bitterness softens
When Old Acquaintance should be forgot

And that’s what you’re doing: forgetting; as though the frigid air could make forgot

Make slick, like the world-weary cobblestones and tiles

To slip, unnoticed and unoppressed by the traffic of profane tourists, skeletons softened

By the drudgery of their cumbersome packs and manuals of facts: Seville

Cathedrals and Visigoths and orange trees

Enthralled by hues of pink in the halo of winter.

Your own passport is stamped with promise yet the winter

Cools within your entrails, not forgot

And the rotten muck of decomposing fruit beneath the Valencia trees

And the throbbing white of a hotel room encased in tiles;

Is your Seville

Dull in loneliness; the piquancy of sleeping pills softens

Until the new morning in a new year, breaks and softens

You sit in a bar eating deep fried phallic totems against the winter

One day to recover your social media felicity: in Seville!

You won’t let the world think you’ve forgot

Those Andalusian villas with their pink and apricot tiles

A myriad of selfie smiles digitally remastered against the dark silhouettes of trees

You post a golden canvas that fades towards darkness and fairy lights in the trees

Signal to the World-wide web that the tumult softens

Inside your head, the fragments might tessellate perfectly like tiles

Or crack you open in great ice-sheathes like winter

You have not forgot.

Even amidst the beauty of Seville

You are the lost and heartsick traveller, ambling through Seville

Sick to death of Rossini’s frantic overture curling through the trees

In days to come, you will have forgot

How byzantine blues and the verisimilitude of orange hues and dirt might have softened

Had only you given yourself to the history and winter

Depart now from winter in Seville; whose tiles crack under trees laden with bitter hopefulness; where memories soften but cannot be forgot

Untitled

For your life to be ending like this no lights on
The trolley screeches in the hall and you don’t care

That cordial is all that’s left now

I thought you’d scream blue murder for one last wine

Instead I rub your feet as you look through me

Past me

A void of forget me not blue

Where you don’t know my name


A good death is humble, fast, noble
Which of these is yours as they take your shit away

In a pan; 
dress your bruises – you sleep on the floor now

The slightest descent of all, from a distance of mere inches

Yet it takes forever
The world seems suspended above you
Photographs of people out of reach

I feed you mangoes on a spoon

Sunshine dripping down your chin

Sunshine 
in your smile – so loving

Fumbling back to conversation so infrequently now:

How's my job, how's my car, how's my
identity - wrapped in fog, in the incessant screaming
Of a tv in the common room

Life dwindles down to this:
Mango pulp pulsing in a cerebral blender 
Where you've got no idea that everything we've been through
Goes beyond the last 20 seconds
Like the goldfish in the waiting room
It's all so incongruous
The will it takes to find you 
You still don’t remember me
Yet I’ll love you forever

Belonging

The neuronal idyll,

The metamorphosis,

Comes solely from reaching

to the outstretched branches

Of the candy floss clouds

of like-minded people

Perfectly just like you

Ode to the spoon

Behold the spoon

Whose limbless form is tribute to our own –

Its usefulness variant upon its steely brain

Or silver, if it pleases you

To have something so useless as to lie in a box

Of crushed velveteen

No sustenance in its wide lips

Except at Christmas.

No, behold the humble spoon

Proud, erect as a solider

Whose duty is to vitalise  

From once a wee child

To the grizzled infirm

With soup and gourds and gruel

Erstwhile guarding the tributaries forming

On one’s chin.

The spoon is a true chameleon:

The poor man’s castanets

Retired to lay side by side,

Knowledge of the other’s round form

Intimate and blunt

It will gouge your heart out with the bluntest blade

And serve it up so beguiling

For someone else to feed on

Shoulda

The mandate that "I should"

was not the golden ticket:

Instead the switch you've flicked, it
pulses electric 
paroxysm

vibing down my neurons
Circumventing safety valves
melting down the wire

into bat shit fucking crazy

The mandate that "I should"

was not the golden ticket:

Instead you've flicked

My neurons

into bat shit fucking crazy

Watermelon

Welcome! Please take a seat
Exchange some politeness:
The strangeness of the weather, and now:
Sandwiches - layering pleasant
Before - I hesitate -
You must absorb the truth:
As I will be relinquishing

The delinquent in

The room - not my fault!

This result!

Yet I’m listening to you speaking

I can hear the words you’re saying

but I can’t quite compute:

Why is it that you

Think that we do not do

Enough to push through

That whom you pushed through

Into the wide world. It

Might seem I'm churlish;

(These words are in my head)

But you're doing my head in!

I can hear what you’re saying

You’re paying – certainly paying

But your words don’t make sense

You speak dollars and cents

And get so incensed!

But surely if it's homework:

That’s got to be your bag.

I won’t ring your doorbell after hours to nag.

Will not roll out my sleeping bag

Set fire to your lawn as I brown

My poor-man’s supper;

Get indigestion over comprehension.

(Have you got any cocoa?)

No and no and no!

We’re all doing our best:

Johnny didn’t pass the test

Johnny didn’t do the essay

Or the story

And the glory

You anticipate

Will surely evaporate

Unless you both cooperate.
Now it's back to sandwiches
Something nice:
Handwriting style?
The next one lingers at the door
Time to build my next rapport.

I can hear what you’re saying

But ten minutes are up.

Your turn to batter up:

It’s your watermelon, lady.

I googled you

I googled you to see if you had died.

Typed [name] + death + dead, to slide

Well past the point of grey to black and white

You hadn’t replied,

You must have died!

Was I aright?

A search revealed in 1489

Presumably, an offender of that time

Like smallpox, plague or St Anthony’s fire.

I eulogised. Sermonised.

But never cried.

The truth of it mystified

As days went on, intensified.

I googled you to see if you had died.

But you hadn’t.

Ode to the dandelion

Why don’t we venerate

Dandelion flowers?

Smiling in colour

Humble, golden simpletons –

Insisting they love you,
not:

Multiplying infestations

Dog-eared yellow; viral

On a pristine lawn.

For what if the fluff

of dandelion flowers,
The seed heads that drift

(soft fairies; spindly spirits)

Were blessings of joy:

Those downy, white spheres

That glance past your nose,

Quivering in your delight

As you set them all free
Dispersing in the wind

Like the spirits of butterflies.

They pirouette in the upstream

Scattering every which way,
Flitting to the heavens

With all your good intentions.

The Paper Feminist

He gives you nothing but a good fuck

Read that carefully:

He – gives - you - nothing

That you said you wanted

But folds you up,

Contorts you like origami –

Once you were a bird, but one fold more makes you a

Hollow box

Where he will keep
All his things
As inside you curl, fetal
And you'll take your share
So you don't care - You will 
keep a spreadsheet
take what’s owed.

Won’t you?

Limbs locked tight,
Do you ever think
of how you’d fill yourself?

Do you still recall

where you wanted to fly, little bird - 

A feminist?

Or, do you assert 
that this was your choice,

Independent women invest -

You’re invested!

With eyes wide open while the hand

closes around you

Tonight you’ll feel him smudging your lines,

Folding you into smaller pieces

A bird unfolded and remade into a box,               

Doubled over to make a lid

Clown

Clown

What a card you are,

Orange on azure -

Phenomenal fluorescent beam you enthrall

As an anecdote to the banal; in coral

You delight us!

Excited by the cartoon theatrics

We forget ourselves, because of you

We breathe through plastic tubes

Convinced we cannot drown.

But what of you, clown?

Does the clown delight in himself –

A scaly globe of orange endearment?

Or does he swim with frantic gulps

To not be overcome amidst the coral?

Spring Cleaned (reopening after renovations)

Re-opening after renovations

It breaks my heart to tell you that I’ve finally turned my back

Dust-busted the carpet and rolled it up again and stacked

The guest towels, faintly jaundiced by time, with the soaps of

Little heart shaped welcome – so broken

When I laid them out. Thinking, knowing, that you would come back.

And now I slide closed this door, the one I promised would be left open

For your return from the misty bog outside, always hoping

That you’d shrug your way back in. Yes, your intention was clear:

Nothing more than a “Fuck you and die” that reverberated for years.

And I didn’t lie to you – I was going to leave it open.

Yet when the mist here cleared and the mire dried out

The comet of your arrival carried unexpected doubt

That shone on dirty windows that had long obscured my view –  

So it breaks my heart to tell you that I’ve decided not to

Turn the dwelling of my being, once more, inside out.

I gave a home to things not my business to lodge, or

Rather, slaved in the kitchen trying to conjure

Miracles from my own housekeeping; now, l draw the curtains at last

Whose layered fabric shows the moth-holes of 6 winters past

And there’s no complaint you can lodge.

So if you’d please just do the same, and draw the cord on it. I’m sorry.

I’ll promise now to miss you always. I’m not sorry.

For as the dust settles, the photos on the wall illuminate no regret

And the warmth in my house, in tiny bubbles, rises yet

On a new morning, as I remember. Everything. And I’m not sorry.